Langston Hughes
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Langston Hughes
"Hughes' efforts to create a poetry that truly evoked the spirit of Black
America involved a resolution of conflicts centering around the problem of
identity" (Smith 358). No African American poet, writer, and novelist has
ever been appreciated by every ethnic society as much as Langston Hughes was.
Critics argue that Hughes reached that level of prominence, because all his
works reflected on his life's experience, whether they have been good or bad. He
never wrote one single literary piece that did not contain an underlying message
within the specific work; in other words, all his works had a definite purpose
behind them. Providing that the reader has some insight about the life of this
great poet, he can readily arrive to the conclusion that Hughes' life effected
his works to the fullest extent, even when only breezing through Langston
Hughes' works. Langston Hughes, "one of the most original and versatile of
twentieth-century black writers" (Shirley 1), was born on February 1st,
1902, in Joplin, Missouri. When Hughes was still a baby, his father, James
Nathaniel Hughes, abandoned the family and left for Mexico. As soon as she
divorced her husband, his mother, Carrie Langston Hughes, a schoolteacher
struggling to acquire a permanent job position, had to place him under the
caring arm of his grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary. Hughes' grandmother
"helped inspire in him a devotion to the cause of social justice" (Rampersad
55), for her first husband died fighting at Harpers Ferry under John Brown, and
her second husband became a fierce abolitionist. Being always a lonely child,
Hughes turned to reading and poetry early in his life. Developing a great
respect for writers like Paul Dunbar and Carl Sandburg, he soon began writing
his own poems. Shortly after submitting a few poems to the school's magazine
editor, Hughes' poems could be read by everyone at Central High School, a local
Cleveland school he was attending. After his graduation, Hughes attempted to
peacefully reunite with his father, who was now a wealthy lawyer in Mexico, in
order to ask for money so he could pursue a quality post-high school education.
After his unsuccessful attempt, Hughes returned to the United States, deciding
that his faith will lie only in his hands. On his way back, Hughes wrote one of
his most famous poems "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," readily admitting
that he wrote the best when he was sad and depressed" (Early 26). In 1921,
Hughes spent a year a...
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